The Guide to Inexpensive (and FREE!) Digital Marketing Tools

Often times, one of the biggest challenges for small-to-medium sized business as it relates to digital marketing is finding affordable and effective tools to help execute, deliver, and measure marketing initiatives.

In response to this issue, we’ve put together a guide to inexpensive and free digital marketing tools. For any given marketing activity (website analytics, email marketing, social media management) there are a number of great options to choose from. Often, the tricky part is in weighing desired functionality and affordability.

First, let’s dive into defining a few terms you’ll see in this guide:

A marketing technology stack is a grouping of technologies that marketers leverage to conduct and improve their marketing activities. The goal is to make difficult processes easier, measure impact, and do more with less.

Marketing automation refers to human-free processes that are triggered by a users’ action. An example would be a series of emails that are automatically sent to a contact after they register for an upcoming event.

An opt-in is when a person voluntarily signs-ups or subscribes and gives a company permission to communicate with them via email. Users typically opt-in to eNewsletters to stay in the know with a company they like, or to receive some sort of incentive such as discounts or content (eBook/white paper).

For the purposes of this post, we’ll break our guide into 3 parts:

1. Website Tools

Google Analytics

What It Does

Google Analytics measures traffic and user behaviors on your website. It contains tons of website intelligence to help you understand not only which areas of your website are the most popular with your users, but also which devices they’re using to view your website, and which browsers they’re using on those devices, to name only a couple.

Key Features

Insight into the number of visitors to your website (daily, weekly, monthly, custom)

Setup Difficult:

Cost: FREE

Optinmonster

What It Does

OptinMonster is website lead generation tool designed to increase your email subscriber list.

Key Features

Create customized opt-in forms to attract new email subscribers

A/B testing of opt-in forms

Exit Intent Technology that triggers forms when a user indicates intent to exit a page

Pop-Up, Sidebar, and In-Line opt-in forms

Built-In Conversion Analytics

Page-Level Tracking

Setup Difficult:

Cost: From $9/month to $29/month (Annual)

2. Email Marketing Tools

Mailchimp

What It Does

Mailchimp is an email marketing tool that enables you to build a subscriber list and then communicate with them via one-off emails and automated, trigger-based lead nurturing campaigns. Mailchimp’s interface is extremely intuitive and the email design tool enables non-designers to create great looking messages.

Key Features

Subscriber List Management

Custom Subscriber Properties

Email Marketing

Drag-and-Drop Email Design & Personalization

Embeddable Subscriber Sign-Up Forms for Your Website

Automation

Email Reporting & Analytics (sends, opens, clicks)

Setup Difficult:

Cost: Between FREE and $199/month*

*The free version of Mailchimp includes full functionality. The only caveat is that it’s capped at 2,000 subscribers, after which, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid account.

Setup Difficult:

Cost: Between FREE and $299/month

Hopefully you’ve found this guide helpful. Keep in mind that there are several high-quality and affordable digital marketing tools. Hubspot, for instance, is a powerful all-in-one tool that encompasses email marketing, landing page creation, social media management and more.

The tools mentioned above were selected with the small-to-medium sized business in mind, where ease-of-use, features, and affordability were the top priorities.

Looking for a recommendation for a specific type of digital marketing tool? Let us know below in the comments.

James Korte

James Korte is a guest author at VARTECH Nation, a design thinker, voracious reader and technology enthusiast. Previously, James has worked in product development, marketing research and professional sports. His interests include: everything digital, travel, videography and ice hockey.